QuirkyTech-nologies

Instructional Need: "My grade level PLC has been working very hard to use data about student progress to plan for future learning. We're pretty good at sharing ideas about our own instruction but we need to consider new instructional strategies that perhaps would help with some of the issues we're dealing with."

Solution: Two (or more) heads are always better than one and many educators have begun working in PLC's to improve their instruction and effect student learning. While there are a number of printed resources, video has the advantage of demonstrating a strategy being implemented live in a classroom and provides the ability to stop, rewind and review. That's where the Teaching Channel can help.

Instructional Need: "My students have been reading and learning standards based skills for nonfiction text. We've used many different types of nonfiction text along with a number of close reading strategies which have fostered rich conversations among the students. I'd like to continue to build on their interest and help them to maintain the skills they've learned. What resources are available that will provide my students with texts that cover a variety of topics and will allow me to continually monitor and assess their skills?"

Solution: Not only will our students need to deal with nonfiction texts of all types throughout their school careers but, exposure to this type of text supports building background knowledge. In his book, "Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement", Robert Marzano points out that research tells us that "what students already know about the content is one of the strongest indicators of how well they will learn new information relative to the content."

Newsela is a free resource that provides students with authentic nonfiction texts from real world publications. These texts can provide a source for continuing development of reading skills as well as build background knowledge around a variety of topics.